Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Annual Christmas bird tally counting on counters

This year’s annual Christmas bird count will be counting humans as well as avians as Victoria tries to reach a new milestone of 300 field scouts.
birds005558.jpg
A hooded merganser at Swan Lake.

This year’s annual Christmas bird count will be counting humans as well as avians as Victoria tries to reach a new milestone of 300 field scouts.

Ann Nightingale, organizer of the count, said Victoria set the all-time Canadian record last year for field spotters, with 282 people out recording the numbers and species of birds seen.

“Our numbers are definitely increasing, because we used to barely break 200,” said Nightingale, a member of the Victoria Natural History Society. “To break 300 would be awesome.”

She said other Canadian communities, notably Edmonton and Calgary, attract more participants, but most are indoors watching their feeders. That yields good census data, but field records require extra commitment and bring special birding glory.

This year’s Victoria Christmas Bird Count is on Saturday, and names are already being taken for anyone who wants to take part. Experience is not necessary, but binoculars are recommended.

The Christmas count is an annual census of feathered residents in a particular area. Birders (they never call themselves “bird watchers”) identify and tally species and their numbers around their home locales — urban streets, vacant lots, parks and, in Victoria’s case, open water.

In every participating community, maps are spread out, a 24-kilometre-diameter circle is drawn, geographic grids are laid down and teams or individuals assigned. The aim is to blanket the area and identify and count all the bird species and their numbers in one day.

It’s a tradition that began in Victoria in 1959 and is part of a North American phenomenon dating to 1900, according to the Audubon Society. The results of these counts are long-term data gold for scientists and regularly used in scientific papers.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s headline-grabbing study indicating three billion birds have disappeared from North America since 1970 cited Christmas counts in the study data. Nightingale said Victoria’s counts reflect dispiriting news similar to that in Cornell’s study. As recently as 1992, 125,000 individual birds were tallied in Victoria. More recent tallies hover around 75,000.

In 2004, Victoria set a Canadian record with 154 bird species spotted, recorded and counted. That hasn’t been matched since anywhere in Canada, including Victoria.

Nightingale said there was a real push that year to achieve something special to honour the Victoria Natural History Society’s 60th anniversary. The club determined it would spot and record every single species ever known to live in Victoria, including those rarely seen.

“Grouse, for example, are now harder to find than 30 years ago and most years we miss grouse,” she said. “So we sent people into the hills and told them: ‘Do not come back until you have seen some grouse.’ ”

Birders were also on the alert ahead of the official count day, keeping track of rare species that had been blown into Victoria far from their normal range. On the day of the count, birders knew where these rarities could be found.

This year, some of the rarities being tracked include American tree sparrows, spotted on Martindale and Panama Flats, and a flock of lesser goldfinches, spotted near Fort Street and Foul Bay Road in late November.

Nightingale said both would be valued species for this year’s count and Victoria birders are prepared.

“But I’ve already spent a few hours looking for both species and not seen them,” Nightingale said. “They may well still be there, but sometimes, locating them is not as easy as you hoped.”

To learn more about the Victoria Christmas Bird Count, including how to sign up, go to christmasbirdcount.ca.